Elastic Stack Reviews

Initially, my company started with Elastic Stack for some kind of search in one of the mobile-related projects we were handling and when Kibana was available in the beta release version. My company enabled Elastic Stack for most of the cases of one of our customers, and mostly, it was for the search-related area. My company managed the search for complex scenarios, not only for the logs but also for the FDA and drug database for the physicians involved in one of the healthcare projects, where the search capability had to be enabled. Apart from AWS, Amazon CloudWatch offers a faster setup process for Elastic Stack. With AWS, my company used ELK Stack and Kibana for all kinds of other things instead of Amazon CloudWatch.

One of the biggest assets of the Elastic Stack is its search capability, as it is one of the core features that my company leverages for most things, including the search of logs. Regarding the timestamp and retrieval of logs, anyone apart from the production support with proper access can search the log timestamp, including the exact details of what has been logged and what caused the issue. For application-related or large sets of data that are not relational, like in a JSON format, my company is pushing and putting across the Elasticsearch index, and once it is enabled, the search can be made faster.

Elastic Stack provides all sorts of things, so it provides Elasticsearch for the transformations into a specific format, and pipelines can be defined for distributed applications along with the logs that come in the JSON format, which is clean. It's only the enhancements or the security that the product lacks and needs to be enhanced. I don't think further enhancement of the features needs to be added to the solution because it is already equivalent to a monitoring or alerting system, like Dynatrace and other tools. Some developments in the area of AI, which Elastic Stack is currently working on, should be fine in terms of the enhancements.

Whenever some critical issue happens, there should be some kind of a co-pilot that helps resolve the issue. The tool should learn from its own previous issues. If you take Databricks, you see that it provides a co-pilot for Python, so a similar kind of development in Elastic Stack would be a real asset for it.

AI would be considered a good way to enable the tool further for more in 2024, and even a beta launch would be helpful. If you take any sort of cloud-native monitoring product, like Azure Monitor or AWS CloudWatch, you see that such products don't provide much of the insights. If you go with Azure Monitor for any sort of ML models to be there, Sentinel needs to be used from Azure, which is very costly.

AI-enablement would be a big improvement in Elastic Stack. Everyone in the monitoring space, including Dynatrace and New Relic, has lately been discussing AI, but it doesn't seem to be coming out. If there is room for an ML model in Elastic Stack, then it would be good.

I have been using Elastic Stack for more than seven years.

The stability of the product is good as it can be fine-tuned to meet all its specified parameters by following the best practices.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The scalability depends on how the cloud team, the DevOps team, or the development team uses the in-built functionalities in the solution, like the indexes, as they occupy quite a lot of space, making it pretty slow.

At any given point in time, the concurrent users of the tool would be around 1,000.

The online forum of the product is fine since anybody can respond to it to help resolve someone else's issues. My company has never contacted the support team of Elastic Stack.

Azure Monitor or the AWS CloudWatch provides only cloud-native services, so you will be able to monitor only the services of Azure or AWS since neither of the products is a cloud-agnostic tool in nature. If you take Azure Monitor and monitor something in AWS, it is not possible. The agent is not comfortable with Azure Monitor, where AWS services are monitored, meaning one may face some difficulties. Elastic Stack is a cloud-agnostic product, so you can have Elastic deployed on Azure, and you can monitor AWS or GCP services as well.

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The solution can be deployed in half a day. With all the cloud security, subnets in place, and the other things being allocated, everything can be completed. Our company does have some sort of scripts to take care of the deployment part, so we have written some Terraform scripts from scratch, which pull the Docker image, the latest version of the Docker image, and then deploy it onto the VM.

I took care of the product deployment phase by myself.

For a few of the cases, my company uses the license to the version of the solution, and for a few other cases, we use the cloud-managed service by AWS since Elasticsearch is equivalent to OpenSearch with AWS, along with a few of the tweaks that are there, but ultimately both the products are one and the same.

The pricing of the product depends on how the capacity planning has been done in your company and the plan that has been chosen for use in the environment. Ultimately, the pricing depends upon the capacity planning that the enterprise architect does.

The security part of the product is fine since, anyway, it gets deployed in a VPC or under a subnet, so the cloud provider takes care of the security part.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

In my company, we use Elastic Stack for managing logs from various equipment, and then we create alerts in some cases before sending them to one of our projects.

The most valuable feature of Elastic Stack is its ease of implementation. The tool has various services like security, managing, and searching logs. Elastic Stack is one of the best tools, and I highly recommend it since it influences everything in one's environment.

The implementation of dashboards in the solution needs to be made easier. Last year, I implemented dashboards with the help of Docker's compose file, and I had some issues with the ports and configuration since it was kind of complex to implement with Docker.

The product's dashboard and maintenance are two areas that need improvement.

I have experience with Elastic Stack beginning in 2023. I am an end user of the solution. I used Elastic Stack as a part of one of our company's projects involving certain security aspects for three months.

The solution's stability was great. I only had issues with the pieces of equipment we were using in our company since I don't have such a great server, restricting the use of only features that open on my computer. Stability is an area that can be terrible if you don't have a great server.

It is a very scalable solution. It is very easy to scale up logs. I didn't face any problem with this scalability part of the solution since we only have a few pieces of equipment in our company. For bigger enterprises, I am unsure if the product would be a very scalable one.

Elastic Stack was used in our company for just one project, so only one of my colleagues and I were using it.

My experience with the solution's customer support team was great. Though I hadn't interacted much with the technical support team, they used to respond via emails if we faced some issues with the solution in our company.

I use Apache Kafka to manage the flow between two databases.

Elastic Stack's deployment process could be done easily because of the documentation and availability of videos everywhere related to the deployment phase.

The deployment process for the product got completed within a few days.

One of my colleagues and I were the only two people involved in the product's implementation phase.

I used the open-source version of Elastic Stack, because of which I did not have to pay anything.

I want to use some tools so that I can manage and visualize the flow while having scalability and availability options.

I have experience with the benchmarking of Splunk, IBM, and QRadar. I had only searched for the videos and documentation of the aforementioned tools and didn't use them since they weren't open-source products. Pricing was a major area of difference between Elastic Stack and the products I evaluated.

For those looking for just some support products or an open-source service, Elastic Stack can be a great choice. For organizations handling big projects, IBM STACK can be a better choice compared to Elastic Stack.

The maintenance part of the solution was difficult since I wasn't aware of the process, but after doing a few searches online, I felt the maintenance part to be good. Some additional knowledge is required to maintain the product.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the solution as our backend with information for a team. We also use Elastic as our database. We saw a lot of logs from our devices through Elastic Stack. 

We can group a lot of alarms into one automation alarm supervision. It's quite helpful for us. We used that to suppress our alarms. Elastic already provides the agent. It is easy to integrate Elastic Stack with other devices and vendors.

Support could be improved. The error code is not helpful. We have to ask for it or pass it on to community forums. It's quite hard to understand what's wrong with our Elastic. If we have trouble, we often need to experiment with how to solve the problem.

I have been using Elastic Stack for two years.

The solution has downtime and glitches.

I rate the solution’s stability as four out of ten.

We can apply the solution to small to large enterprises.

I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten.

We can ask for technical support, but sometimes, we need to solve the problems quickly. Since the error code is not helpful, we need to experiment with how to solve the problems before, or to do a quick repair. We can also escalate it to Elastic.

The initial setup is complex.

I rate the product’s pricing as five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

If your company meets the criteria for a database platform that is easily integrated with third-party devices and vendors or easily integrated with a solution that you are currently developing, then Elastic is quite a good solution for you.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I use the solution for logging. I must check the logs and alerts regularly to see if an incident occurs. Also, I'm using the EDR to check for any network viruses in all my environments.

The tool is huge, and it performs brilliantly. I tested it for malware, and within two weeks of launching, the product alerted me about a network intrusion. This was a tough test for it, but it performed admirably. The alerting system is excellent, and searching through logs is incredibly efficient. What's impressive is that all three products or options are integrated into one solution. This means I don't need separate logging, monitoring, or antivirus solutions.

The tool's pricing can be improved. 

I have been using the product for five years. 

It can be quite challenging when it comes to administration and expanding our cluster management. As our company grows, managing these aspects becomes even more difficult.

As the logs increase in volume, the workload becomes heavier. We must establish different tiers, such as high tiers, hot tiers, etc. This requires careful calculations to determine the specifications for each tier and how to manage data flow through the cluster efficiently.

The tool's implementation is easy. However, it requires someone familiar with Elastic Stack and an understanding of the data flow. It might be challenging for beginners or those unfamiliar with Elastic Stack to utilize and gather logs efficiently and fully. However, implementing it becomes much easier once you have at least a year of experience working with the product.

My company consults with other companies in the Fintech sector. So, I'm implementing the solution in all Fintech companies we work with to obtain the PCI certificate. This PCI certificate is required to work in the fintech sector. I'm installing this solution in all other Fintech companies as a consulting company.

I work with the plugin for customer management, monitoring logs for each product, feature, or application. This simplifies life for end users. However, I'm pleasantly surprised by its success. The only downside is that the license is a bit expensive.

Every day, I start by opening the Elastic Stack Analytics loop. I check the sources and cloud store payloads. Then, I move on to Kibana, inspecting every feature I've installed or worked with. I check if Kibana is in the green, yellow, or red state, addressing any issues. Lastly, I meticulously examine logs from each data source, ensuring that all data is being received without issues and investigating any queues or anomalies that may arise.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. No other solution combines these three components, and no logging system offers the same level of functionality for logging, SIEM, and antivirus in one package. I've extensively searched for alternatives to Elastic Stack to avoid licensing issues, but I couldn't find any solution that matches its capabilities.

We use the solution to do threat analysis. We also have an integration with a threat intelligence platform.

The machine learning capabilities are valuable. I also like the auto-recognition of the fields with the data sources. The product can be deployed easily. All these features are available in the community version. The enterprise version might be much better. The SaaS version is way better. The solution has many features. It is very easy to learn and scale up. We can learn the query language very easily.

Agent deployment is a little tough in the on-premise version. Fleet Manager is tough to use. The configuration is tough. The SaaS version might not have such issues, though.

I have been using the solution for a year.

The tool is very stable. We didn’t see any lag in the product.

If we use the Kubernetes version, it will auto-scale directly. We are using the tool for machine-learning purposes. We have 1 TB of log sources.

The initial setup is very easy. We just have to do a Docker deployment.

We are using the open-source community version of the product.

I am using the latest self-hosted community version. It suits our needs. If someone wants to use the product, they must consider their scalability needs. They must think about how much they're going to ingest and how they’re going to retain the data. They might have to put it into hot, cold, and warm types of data storage. We must consider all these things before deploying the product. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company uses Elastic Stack extensively for its functionality or feature known as observability.

From what I have heard about the solution from other sources, I know that there were some issues with pushing data from other sources to Elastic Stack, making it the solution's only shortcoming that needs improvement. When people try to move the data from another source to Elastic Stack for visualization, they face challenges when connecting to Elastic Stack from such different sources. The aforementioned details can be considered for improvement in the solution.

I have experience with Elastic Stack, also known as ELK Stack, for five years. I am a customer of the solution.

The solution's technical support is good. Elastic Stack has good customer service managers who respond well to my queries.

I don't think we have done much in my company with Elastic Observability. In my previous assignment, I had used the solution more like a search functionality. Our company used the platform to provide our customers the features to search for different medicines, as it was a B2B platform. Observability Kibana Dashboard is something that we used in our company to analyze some of the logs, but I can't provide in-depth feedback on the product.

Elastic Stack offers good value for value for money based on the product's features and what they offer. The product's overall performance was good based on my limited experience with the product.

I think Elastic Stack is definitely a good product.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

I use the solution along with Kibana to visualize and analyze the logs. I plan to use Elastic Stack as a cloud service platform for future projects because it streamlines DevOps workflows.

The tool's most powerful aspect is its search engine capability. It's a highly effective and powerful solution for searching. We use it in professional and student projects at universities, and it delivers promising results.

Elastic Stack's search capabilities can be challenging, especially when searching for precise data from past years, such as two or ten years ago. Its indexing performance for exact data retrieval may decrease as the data volume grows. Therefore, I believe there is room for improvement in the product's search functionality. It needs to improve its pricing as well. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

I rate the product's stability a six out of ten. 

I find Elastic Stack's native scaling and sorting capabilities very powerful and suitable for scalability. Just like MongoDB, it offers native scaling features. We use medium-sized Elastic Stack in our projects. We experience considerable traffic, with thousands of requests occurring within minutes, although not within seconds.

I haven't used the tool's support. 

We downloaded the open-source version, which comes with an open-source license. Setting it up was easy. However, the maintenance, particularly the DevOps tasks, can be challenging. It's not exactly within my expertise, and I might need support from our IT to handle those aspects.

Depending on my client's specific needs, I use a mix of on-premise and cloud solutions. I implement private clusters for some customers who require data to remain on their own premises. However, I prefer cloud solutions for my projects and in general. Working in both academic and industrial settings in cloud computing, I find cloud solutions more convenient and powerful. Yet, I understand that each client has unique requirements, and some prefer to have their data stored and processed on-premise.

The tool's deployment takes an hour to complete. 

I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

I don't have direct experience with data security. However, we ensure data security by deploying Kibana within our network and restricting access to it via VPN. The solution doesn't need any maintenance. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

I use the solution to monitor and collect logs.

The most valuable features of the solution are automatic analysis, anomaly detection, and new features.

The main issue related to Elastic Stack is in the area of its licensing. The licenses of the product have changed, and the community-driven open-source fork of Elasticsearch has created a lot of issues in terms of compatibility between the products, which is not nice. The aforementioned areas are to be considered for improvement in the product.

I have been using Elastic Stack for seven to ten years. I am a customer of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a six to seven out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Around 30 people in my company use the solution.

The solution is used daily in our company.

I have faced some issues with the technical support team of the product since some of the issues for which tickets were raised in the past were never resolved.

I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

In the past, I have used log aggregation tools like Snare Central. I started to use Elastic Stack since it provides a single place to consolidate all of the logs. The tool allows quick digging inside the logs, looking for a part or specific events, and generating reports.

I rate the initial setup phase a seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup phase, and ten is an easy setup process.

The solution is deployed on the cloud services offered by AWS and on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed and configured in a couple of weeks.

Our company's in-house team, consisting of me alone, completed the deployment process.

I have experienced a return on investment from the use of the solution.

The product is expensive.

All of the team members who work with me in the company participate in the maintenance process of the product.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.